Mel,
John Wanamaker famously said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
That was over a century ago.
Back at the turn of THIS century, in the gleaming morning of internet advertising, all us optimistic direct marketing folks enthused…
Finally! With tracking and analytics, we will know what's being wasted and what is not! Our ad spend will become so much more efficient and successful! Hip Hip…hooray! Hip hip…
Not so fast.
That bright naive dawn lasted only a handful of years.
Then, things started to get dark and cloudy again.
And here we are in 2025 with all our fancy tracking and analytics, it's actually gotten HARDER to know which half is wasted.
Why? Because your customers don't live in neat little digital boxes anymore.
They might see your Google Ad, then get your direct mail piece, watch your commercial on Hulu, read some reviews, and finally convert through "organic search" three weeks later.
Your CRM smugly tells you it was a "branded search conversion."
Meanwhile, you just wasted $30,000 on connected TV ads that ran at 3 AM on Pluto TV to empty living rooms.
(Yes, this actually happens. A lot.)
I'm seeing two types of business owners struggling with this right now:
1. You're already spending significant money on marketing. Your campaigns "work"... kind of.
But you have this nagging feeling that a big chunk is being wasted. You just can't put your finger on where.
2. You know you SHOULD be spending more on marketing. Your business is solid. Your customers love you. But you're gun-shy about scaling up your marketing because you've been burned before. You need every dollar you spend to come back with friends.
If either of these sounds like you, I'd like you to meet Ben Morris.
Ben is doing something unique: Combining old-school direct response principles with modern multi-channel attribution in ways I've never seen before.
One client was already doing well with direct mail but suspected waste. Ben's analysis found they were repeatedly mailing people who lived 45 minutes from their location... when they had another location 10 minutes away from those same prospects!
Another client was scared to scale up marketing. Ben helped them start small, prove the model works, then gradually expand – all while maintaining profitability at each step.
Ben is doing a special webinar for my tribe next week.
He's going to break down how he helps businesses:
- Find and eliminate marketing waste
- Scale up marketing safely and systematically
- Track real results across multiple channels
- Make sure every dollar spent comes back with friends
Date: Tuesday, Feb. 11
Time: 3pm Eastern
Register Here
Fair warning: This isn't for everyone. But if you recognized yourself in either of those two scenarios above, you'll want to be there.
Seize the day,
Perry Marshall
P.S. You know what's worse than wasting half your marketing budget? Wasting half your marketing budget while your competitors figure out how to make every dollar work.
